Business Strategy

From those promoting global corporations down to those crafting ads for the smallest businesses, advertisers of every size know that choosing the wrong words, colors, or images can harm the effectiveness of a particular advertisement, potentially scaring away the very people they’re trying to entice. For this reason, advertisers spend a great deal of time, money, and effort trying to make sure their ads are as effective as possible.

But how can you know beforehand if your ads really will be effective, and not just a waste of time? By testing their ads against one another in a process called multi-variant testing, split… Continue reading →

How To Use Facebook To Market Your Business: Part 1- Setting Up Your Business Page

For many individuals, Facebook is the greatest thing ever invented. Others think it’s an utter waste of time. But regardless of how you personally view it, the truth is Facebook has grown into a powerful tool for marketing businesses of all kinds. With over 1.5 billion people actively using Facebook each month, it’s a great platform to reach audiences and customers you’d never encounter otherwise, and learning how to use it to promote your products and services might just give your business the marketing boost you’ve been looking for.

In this article, we’ll show you how to create a Facebook Business page from beginning to end, and when we’re done, you’ll know everything you need to create your own Facebook Business page in just a matter of minutes, no matter how familiar you are with computers or online marketing. Of course, simply setting up your account merely scratches the surface of what Facebook can do for your business, since it also offers one of the best online-marketing systems currently available, but we’ll cover that in a future article.

Blunt, Yet Sharp

Bluntness is the first word that comes to mind as I begin this review, and it’s the best part of this book. I like it, I try to use it, and I appreciate others who don’t waste time getting to the point. Mr. Dennis is very blunt and direct. The founder of Maxim magazine and publisher of about fifty other magazines, he started from nothing. Today, he estimates his net worth is between 400 and 900 million dollars. While that’s a big gap in his estimated figures, one thing is certain; he more than qualifies to be in the “rich” category.

The worst thing about this book is the title. I turned the book face down and hid it in a drawer as I was reading it. I am sure that if any of my friends saw the title, they would laugh at my naivety and gullibility for thinking a book would help me become rich. I would not have even picked this book up off the shelf had it not been for someone’s recommendation, who said it is really about the focus, determination and discipline needed to start and grow a simple small business into a successful one. Continue reading →

We recently needed to form an entirely new company from scratch. Being entrepreneurs, and having limited spare time, we needed a way to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible. In the end, we were able to do everything, from verifying our business’ name to obtaining a tax ID to registering with the Secretary of State, all in one afternoon.

Of course, you shouldn’t create your own LLC in one afternoon unless you’ve already put in a great deal of time and thought. That said, we’d like to show you it’s actually much quicker and easier to form an LLC than you might think. We’ve laid out our experiences below in hopes that it helps others interested in forming an LLC understand the process, and to show just how quickly and easily it can be done. Continue reading →

How Much Do Your Customers Cost?

On average, how many people visit your store, website or place of business without buying anything? How much time and effort must you spend on each new prospect before they become a client? Once they become a customer, how often will they buy, and how much? How long will they continue to buy from you? How much does it cost you to win a new customer over, or to keep an existing one?

As a small business owner, you must know the answers to these questions in order to make intelligent marketing and advertising decisions. Before you spend valuable time and money trying to attract new clients, you’ll first need to determine how much it will cost to actually acquire them. Not only that, but you’ll also need to calculate the average lifetime value (or income) that new client or customer will ultimately generate. Why? Because understanding how to effectively focus your marketing and advertising dollars could make the difference between cost-effectively attracting new clients or foolishly squandering precious resources.

Although accounting may be your least favorite thing about running a small business, there are a few simple mathematical rules you absolutely must understand to be successful in the business world. These rules are used time and again, and influence decisions that might drastically affect your business.

One of the most important mathematical formulas for businesspeople to understand is how to calculate return on investment, or ROI. Having a firm understanding of how return on investment works could save your project or business untold money and time, and possibly make the difference between success and failure.

We’d like to think that everyone makes sound, well-reasoned choices regarding purchasing products and services. But in reality, people are complicated, and so are the emotions that drive them. Marketers and scientists study how emotion and motivation influence behavior, and in the process uncover ways to influence buyers by appealing to their negative emotions, fears, and insecurities. The results are tools, neutral and harmless until used in the wrong way, and despite the possibility of exploitation, these tools can be used to increase customer satisfaction and repeat business.

Preying on people’s weaknesses and fears to sell your products is unethical. But if you’re solving real problems for them, instead of lying and stealing their money, you can use… Continue reading →

One of the most difficult situations many novice marketers and business-people of all kinds are faced with is how to price products and services. Charging too much will hurt your bottom line and reduce your profits, but so will charging too little. Finding the right price to charge can be tricky, but multiple studies have been conducted to help find the best way to price products and services, revealing a number of useful insights about the human mind in the process.

Understanding how customers view the price and value of your products, and using proven pricing strategies, can help take the guesswork out of pricing and selling your products and services.

There are hundreds of ways to market businesses of any size, but for a small businesses owner or entrepreneur, it may seem impossible to find which marketing strategy will work best for you. Luckily, it’s not impossible, but it does take a bit of work.
Every business or product is different, but one universal rule holds true: You have to know your product, your competitors, and your customers like the back of your hand before you have any chance of successfully marketing your products or services.
The most important part of being in business is making sales. All the good intentions in the world won’t pay your bills or help you realize your dreams. Yet despite how important this… Continue reading →

If you’re trying to decide how to price your product, or wondering how the process of marking-up an item works, read on. You’ll learn about how cost is determined, why some items sell for so much more than their cost, and how you can decide the best price to sell your product for.

It’s sometimes hard to see how items are priced. Sometimes the cost to the final buyer is much more than for the retailer that sold it. Some prices are marked up hundreds, or even thousands, of times more than they cost to the seller. How can an item bought for so little sell for so much? Is it because sellers are greedy, and want as much… Continue reading →